BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Turn of the Screw
My Sister and I, The Diary of a Dutch Boy Refugee. By Dirk van der Heide. (Faber. 3s. 6d.) WE are all of us -emigrants from a country we can remember little of : it haunts us and we try to reconstruct it, but all that is most important about it escapes us. We feel that we have never been so happy since we left it or so miserable, but we can't remember how happiness felt or the quality of the misery: we watch our children's eyes for hints. Knowledge has altered the taste of every emotion: during an air-raid we may occasionally hear a child crying, but we know no more of what he feels than we know of the dog wailing in a locked and empty house - but just because we know so little we feel the heavy responsibility of not understanding—horror happening to a child seems twice the horror because we don't know what he feels and can't help him: it is James's Turn of the Screw.
It is our sense of responsibility that makes this diary of a twelve-year-old Dutch boy who was living on the outskirts of Rotterdam when the invasion started. so terrible. We feel the weight of the millstone round our own necks. His mother was killed by a bomb on the second day of the invasion, his father is a veterinary surgeon and is still in Holland. An uncle brought Dirk and his sister Keetje, aged 9, to England and sent them off to another uncle in the States. "Keetje never mentions Mother and neither do I." We watch all the repressions of experience which will help to form the adult character painfully initiated. Here are the vivid scraps of childhood-horror which the psycho-analyst, stop-watch in hand, may later have to lead his patient back to by way of dreams or faulty memories.
On Wednesday, May 8th, 1940, Keetje had a cold and did not go to school. " I went as usual and Mijnheer van Speyck gave me _a composition to do—rio words on the life of Erasmus by Friday." But on Friday the scene had changed : Rotterdam had been bombed intermittently all day : the children had taken refuge in one of the few air-raid shelters in the neighbourhood- theprivate one of the Baron, who pops up intermittently like the friendly comic Barons of pantomime.
" The noise was worse than firew.orks or thunder and went on all the time. It made my head ache and it made me a little sick to my stomach again. I wasn't frightened, but I felt a way I can't describe. Maybe I was frightened. The raid only lasted a few minutes this time. One bomb came down very near us and people all hurried back into the shelter. We heard the glass falling upstairs. Keetje sat up in the bed during the raid. She was neither all awake nor asleep but she was tired and her hair was stringy and her face pale and she wanted the noise stopped."
On Saturday Dirk begins his diary : " This was another bad day. The war didn't stop, but got worse everywhere." The children's father had gone away to the Army. Their mother had gone to work at the hospital: they were left alone with the neighbours, and the war came closer all the time. Keetje was the first to see a parachutist come down behind the Baron's barn. " We saw Mijnheer van Heist take out his pistol and aim and then he fired three times. He came back a moment later looking very sad and said the German was shot." Then the bombs reached their street. A child, Heintje Klaes (" pretty silly looking . . . and his eyes stick out like tulip bulbs "), was killed and three men. " One of the men was our postmaster and I loved him very much." In such flashes the child communicates to us his sense of values : the love that may light anywhere—on a post- man or a baron: his measurement of terror: " it is worse than anything I ever heard about and worse than the worst fight in the cinema ": his play-instinct that seems to older people callousness.
" We got up a game with several other children playing soldiers and bombers. We took turns jumping off the high back steps holding umbrellas and pretending we were parachutists, but we had to quit this because the grown-ups said it made them nervous." -
And then at the end of Saturday:
" The ambulances coming and going and so many dead people made it hard for me not to cry. I did cry some while the bombing was going on but so many other little children were that no one noticed me I think. I just got into bed with Keetje and hid my face. I was really frightened this time.
Later
Uncle Pieter came back. He didn't find Mother because she is dead. I can't believe it but Uncle Pieter wouldn't lie. We aren't going to tell Keetje yet. The ambulances are still scream- ing. I can't sleep or write any more now or anything." The Baron's cat shrieking in a chimney, Keetje vomiting, the machine-gunned woman dying on the road to Dordrecht, the two lost children who wouldn't talk (Keetje gave one of them her doll—"Keetje was nice to do this : she is often very selfish, but she was good to do this)," the wasted essay on Erasmus, the
fear that suddenly returns in America when it rains (" I thought I was back in Holland and that what was striking the windows were pieces of bombs ")—all this is war, and it is just as well for us sometimes disturbingly to see the conflict of ideologies, the great Democracies and the great Dictatorships, the clarion-calls, the heroisms and the speeches, through the undimmed window
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